Diana experienced a brief thrill of triumph.  She felt convinced that Adrienne would have liked to have Max standing beside her at this moment.  It would have set the seal on an evening of glorious success, completed it, as it were.  And he had refused to come, declined—­so Diana put it to herself—­to share the evening’s triumph with the actress who had so well interpreted his work.  At least this would be a pin-prick in the enemy’s side!

And then—­then—­a hand pulled aside the heavy folds of the stage curtain, and the next moment Max and Adrienne were standing there together, bowing and smiling, while the audience roared and cheered its enthusiasm.

Diana could hardly believe her eyes.  Max had told her so emphatically that he would not come.  And now, he was here!  He had lied to her!  The affair had been pre-arranged between him and Adrienne all the time?  Only she—­the wife!—­had been kept in the dark.  Probably he had spent the entire evening behind the scenes. . . .  In her overwrought condition, no supposition was too wild for credence.

Vaguely she heard some one at the back of the house shout “Speech!” and the cry was taken up by a dozen voices, but Max only laughed and shook his head, and once more the heavy curtains fell together, shutting him and Adrienne from her sight.

Mechanically Diana gathered up her wraps and prepared to leave the box.

“Aren’t you coming round behind to congratulate them, Mrs. Errington?”

Jerry’s astonished tones broke on her ears as she turned down the corridor in the direction of the vestibule.

“No,” she replied quietly.  “I’m going home.”

* * * * * *

“You told me you wouldn’t come to the theatre—­and you intended going all the time!”

Diana’s wraps were flung on the chair beside her, and she stood, a slim, pliant figure in her white evening gown, defiantly facing her husband.

“No, I’d no intention of going.  I detest first nights,” he answered.

“Then why were you there?  Oh, I don’t believe it—­I don’t believe it!  You simply wanted to spend the evening with Adrienne; that was why you refused to go with me.”

“Diana!” Max spoke incredulously.  “You can’t believe—­you can’t think that!”

“But I do think that!”—­imperiously.  “What else can I think?” Her long-pent jealousy had broken forth at last, and the words raced from her lips.  “You refused to come when I asked you—­offered me Jerry as an escort instead.  Jerry!”—­scornfully—­“I’m to be content with my husband’s secretary, I suppose, so that my husband himself can dance attendance on Adrienne de Gervais?”

Max stood motionless, his eyes like steel.

“You are being—­rather childish,” he said at last, with slow deliberation.  His cool, contemptuous tones cut like a whip.

She had been rapidly losing her self-command, and, reading the intense anger beneath his outward calm, she made an effort to pull herself together.